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  Foraged

  Val Lucas

  "FORAGED is a new book from Bowerbox Press, showcasing 7 wild edible foods with wood engravings and hand-set type. Featured are: Wineberry, Morel, Wood-sorrel, Chanterelle, Wild Blueberry, Chicken of the Woods, and Hen of the Woods, with an introductory essay." - Bowerbox Press

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  How To Lose It All at Once

  Amy Pirkle

  "How to Lose it All at Once features excerpts from a longer piece of non-fiction by my twin sister, Sara Pirkle Hughes, about the experience of losing all of her hair while going through chemotherapy at age 33. We began work on this book during the summer of 2017 at The Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota, where we were surrounded by endless fields of dandelions. The dandelions transitioning from bright gold flowers to white orbs to wisps floating on the wind seemed to illustrate her text beautifully.

  "Each two-page spread in the book is a full-bleed reduction linocut, with letterpress text printed on top. " — Amy Pirkle

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  The Proposition of Landscape

  Melissa Wagner-Lawler

  "In this project, Wagner-Lawler uses a work held in UWM's Special Collections entitled The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones published in 1856 and the American Geographical Society Library Digital Map collections. By researching map images of the land boundaries of the areas and ornamentation covered in The Grammar of Ornament, new visual landscapes are created using the decorative ornaments from the text. The artist book takes a small sampling of ornaments from each of the twenty sections of the text and places them into a landscape created out of the reinterpreted boundaries of each country or region. In addition to using the ornamentation from The Grammar of Ornament, the artist book also incorporates some of Jones’ thirty-seven design propositions set forth in his book. These propositions dictate Jones’ suggested best methods for using color and composition in relation to the ornamentation. In the artist book, twenty of these propositions are used to dictate and manipulate the composition of each page. The numbers on each page of the artist book reference the Jones’ propositions." - Artist Website

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  Questions for America

  Aileen Bassis

  "The 2016 presidential election left me shocked, dismayed and profoundly unmoored. I suddenly felt that I didn't understand my country….Each [page] has a different question." - Aileen Bassis.

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  First Impressions

  Ben Blount

  Ben Blount's book, First Impressions, takes a look inside an array of many different people's experiences facing prejudice due to their race. Blount accounts stories of young children to the elderly facing racial discrimination. He writes that they are "personal stories of people's first experience being the 'other.'"

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  Racial Activity Coloring Book

  Ben Blount

  An 8-page coloring book "for kids of all ages" designed to show its users the world through a racial lens. With activities such as a word search, crossword puzzle, and a coloring section, Ben Blount uses an everyday item, a coloring book, as a tool to teach users about racism.

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  Biosphere

  Ginger Burrell

  Biosphere is contained within a 9.25 x 4.25 x 2.125" wooden hinged box. This box is separated into two sections by a wooden piece. Sections contain a Coptic bound book on the left side and four wooden spheres with accordion books on the right side. The contents of the book include 60 instructions on how to save the planet. Each different colored sphere is halved to contain an accordion-structure book and has a magnetic closure. Coptic-bound book: 64 pages, printed inkjet on Rives BFK paper, Dark Courier font, cloth-covered boards, patterned paper pastedowns.

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  The Record

  Anne Covell

  "On January 20th, 2017, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. That same day, the official White House website (whitehouse.gov) began the digital transition to archive and replace Obama’s policies with those of the new administration. Immediately, people began to notice that key issues such as health care, education, and immigration were nowhere to be found. Keyword searches for terms such as “climate change,” “LGBT,” and “civil rights” all returned 404 errors. Even more conspicuously, the Spanish-language version and the disabled-accessible version of the site were no longer available. Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library that has been archiving webpages since 1996, captured 167 snapshots of whitehouse.gov that day. This book records the last snapshots taken of Obama’s policies before they came down, the 404 errors that followed, as well as the Internet Archive timestamps for when the information was last available and when it disappeared." - Anne Covell

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  Maybe Only the Caged Bird Will Sing

  Elsi Vassdal Ellis

  "This edition was not planned or designed in advance but emerged during productive play time to reacquaint myself with my Vandercook 4 while using up leftover materials in the studio. Using mounted fiberglass table mats the printing began by laying down patterns front and back on three stacks of press sheets. Searching through my cuts, dingbats, and ornaments I chose the theme of birds. Lifestyle Crafts inks (light blue and royal blue) were used to print blue ink on blue paper as a continuation of a monochrome series begun in 2012. Room was left for the insertion of text generated from articles saved from The Scientist, Discover, Smithsonian, and The Week. The text highlights the dangers faced by birds as well as survival skills. There are two barrel-roll signatures designed to take advantage of artwork width and potential, and for a binding challenge. No new materials were purchased for this edition as part of my second series, also begun in 2012: 'Waste Not, Want Not.'" — Elsi Vassdal Ellis

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  En Stereo

  Ry McCullough

  En Stereo is a swirling dialogue about the balance between domestic life and existential uncertainty. While examining one reality, the reader is presented with parallel strands of streaming conversations that exist within the experience. Collective as well as singularly isolated, the individuals voice serves as a component to the whole sound. Characters, O and X, discuss the fumbling confusion of the everyday, an ominous column of smoke rises in the distance and a wanderer, E, draws nearer.

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  Audibility/Audibilidad

  Carrie Ann Plank

  Three artists discuss the sound of the state of being in Havana, Cuba, in three languages, visual and written. None of these languages are translations, but rather individual investigations of the same concept. The four subjects, Buscar (to search), Esperar (to wait), Resolver (to solve problems) and Querer (to want) are common in the Cuban vernacular. Artist proof was printed at the Taller Experimental de Gráfica de la Habana and the Taller de Serigrafía René Portocarerro in April, 2017. All imagery by Carrie Ann Plank. Text by Hanoi Pérez and Megan Adie. Bound with the assistance of Yerandee González Durán. Edition completed in San Francisco, 2018. Bound and printed by the artists with the assistance of Chris Rolik and Keisha Mrotek.

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  (w)hole: A Life in Parts

  Miriam Schaer

  (w)hole: A Life in Parts is Miriam Schaer’s exploration her mother Ida’s decline into dementia before Ida's death. A visual essay on how we care for our aging parents when they are unable to care for themselves. (w)hole: A Life in Parts uses Schaer’s original writing, photography and collage.

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  A Room Inside

  Trine Søndergaard

  "Everyone carries an empty room inside,” Franz Kafka wrote in his diary. We all carry something invisible that no one else fully understands. Perhaps even we ourselves do not. Emphasising a private space is a typical practice of Danish camera based visual artist Trine Søndergaard (1972), acclaimed for her silent, yet powerful imagery. A Room Inside presents selected works from the period 2013-2017. Portraits, landscapes and reflections interspersed. They encompass and address themes such as existence, grief, history and transition.

  The book was chosen as one of the Books of the year by the Danish Association of Bookcraft.

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  Pist Protta 79

  Space Poetry

  "With pencil on paper the mind explores the forms and structures through the line drawing them. That goes for most of the content in this issue of Pist Protta.

  "It may be that the action of using the line to take notes by hand aids understanding and rememberance. I had that experience once when I tried to identify some plants collected in Italy where I am not familiar with the flora. To facilitate the comparisons, I drew all the plants in contour on a few sheets of paper — and during that process the forms of the plants became much easier to understand and recognize.

  "Line literally means 'a linen thread,' and the sheer beauty of interweaving lines creates a texture that is close to both text and textile. It might work in at least two ways: that the lines create a meshwork or that the line is an analytic tool in understanding how a specific textile or other thing is made." — Åse Eg Jørgensen

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  Art of the Lie

  Various Artists

  "Art of the Lie" features a collection of nine book artists’ contributions of varying editions on the theme of untruthfulness. The complete set features a “Pack of Lies” 56-card deck in a collector’s box. “Pack of Lies” was an edition of 65 card decks that included contributions from 25 participating artists in designated suits (stars=types of lies, arrows=Dantean circles, bangs=types of fallacies, question marks=historical) with nods to transformation, training, and flashcard decks. Book artist individual contributions for "Art of the Lie" include: "Many Sides" by Kristin Leigh Adolfson (edition 25), "Essay upon the Art of Political lying, excerpts from Jonathan Swift" by Bonnie Bernstein (edition 20), "Parts" by Dean Dass (edition 10), excerpts from "The Passionate Pilgrim, William Shakespeare" by Richard Cappuccio (edition 20), "White Privilege Likes" by Lyall Harris (edition 20), "Liar’s Log" by Nancy Kober (edition 14), "Numbers Don’t Lie" by Kevin McFadden (edition 25), "Same Side" by Garrett Queen (edition 25), "The Age of Euphemism, excerpts from Kevin Young’s Bunk" by Kevin McFadden, et al. (edition 25).

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  Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene

  Philip Zimmermann

  Zimmermann combined three different interests to make a compelling book about climate change – the rising sea levels, airport control towers, and language.

  "Due to a general public concern about climate change, most people have become aware of the term 'anthropocene.' It’s a word relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. For the last two years I have been thinking about a way to make a new artists’ book related to the issues that prompted that term 'anthropocene.'

  "When I thought of a sea level rise of two hundred feet and what that could mean in terms of our cities and our society, the future seemed incredibly bleak. For the landscapes in the book, I decided to create a dystopian set of images that hinted at a future watery world, one where the remnants of civilizations lived in armed and guarded towers, growing their food in vertical farms inside these towers. The rest of the world population would have mostly died off. Marauding remnants exist in small groups that would try to gain entrance into these armed tower structures. The backgrounds of these images were built using scans of steel engravings from several 19th century books. I used photos of water and waves to make the foregrounds. … The goal was to create a series of images of a forbidding and lonely watery world, one that was austerely beautiful but scary and thought-provoking.

  "About two years ago I read an online article by Sarah Zhang, entitled 'The "Harvard Sentences" Secretly Shaped the Development of Audio Tech.' The article was about a fascinating subject, the creation of a series of text lines that were used to test the fidelity of spoken words when broadcast over military and civilian radio transmitters. What ended up being 720 lines of text started as a series of short sentences that were meant to test the accuracy of military communication systems towards the end of the Second World War. … What I found especially interesting about these 720 sentences –72 lists of ten sentences each– is that they are mysteriously poetic and timeless. But they can also be thought of as metaphor for determining (or not) meaning from the static, transmitted signal from noise. We, as the populations and governments of planet earth, certainly have not yet registered the dire warning message of global warming.

  "For the duotone pages I used two sets of images. For the blue background, I used Google earth satellite views of water and shorelines, printed in that deep blue Pantone color. NOAA images of maritime depth charts were used for the silver depth numbers and contour lines. Editing and selecting the Harvard Sentences was a great deal of fun. There were so many that I felt had poetic resonance with the subject matter, starting with the initial text line, 'There is a lag between thought and action' which seemed the perfect way of describing where we as earthlings are in regards to climate change." - Philip Zimmermann

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  Homilies for the 99% or the Resurrection and Resurgence of Horatio Alger

  Aileen Bassis

  This work was made to accompany an exhibit curated by Aileen Bassis in 2016 at Westbeth Gallery in New York City about income inequality. "This group of work references 19th century author Horatio Alger. His enormously popular books stressed the notion that hard work and honesty will enable individuals to rise out of poverty and find financial security." - Aileen Bassis. "A homily is a moral lesson, often a platitude that favors broad brushstrokes of generalities over complex and subtle examination of issues. The aspect of homilies in this work is derived from the literature of Horatio Alger, a writer from the 19th century. He wrote enormously popular books for young adults that stressed simple moral virtues such as honesty and hard work as the means to climb from poverty to financial security. People were reading these during the Depression. These ideas are still floating around and used to blame people for their poverty rather than blame institutional forces. This work combines images and text from Horatio Alger novels with urban street imagery to make prints with mixed media." - Aileen Bassis.

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  Legal Cuban Cigar

  Clifton Meador

  "The American government has had a fraught relationship with Cuba since the Cuban revolution of 1959. Received imagination portrays Havana as a mobster's playground before the revolution — a glittering city of nightclubs and casinos — but after the revolution? We mostly imagine a country of impoverished farmers, a nation with an excellent national health care system, a place of high literacy, a former client state of the Soviet Union, and home to the finest cigars in the entire world.

  "The American relationship with Cuba turned sour when Castro finally revealed that Cuba was, in fact, a Marxist, socialist country aligned with the Soviet Union. The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt, President Kennedy's embargo, and the subsequent Cuban missile crisis were media events played out on television and in newspapers, perhaps the first media-driven international crisis. This mediated spectacle created a 50-year estrangement between Cuba and America that only began to thaw with President Obama's efforts.

  "I traveled in Cuba in the fall of 2015, right after the renewal of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba. One of the places I visited was the tobacco-growing region around Viñales. I thought about the irony in the stereotypical fetishization of Cuban cigars by businessmen, a fascination with cigars grown and produced in an impoverished communist country.

  "The media circus surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis; a horseback ride to a tobacco barn; my first Cuban Cigar." — Clifton Meador

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  Day and Fog

  Mado Reznik

  Theresienstadt, a concentration camp established by the SS during WWII near the city of Terezín in occupied Czechoslovakia, was the showplace camp gussied up by the Nazis after D-Day for a visit by Danish and International Red Cross officials. The intent was to dispel notions of exterminations camps. This work commemorates the artist's recent visit to what remains of the camp.

  "day and fog is part of a journey taken several years ago. It comes from a survey about the Terezín ghetto in the Czech Republic, where art was legally promoted by Nazis but also [pursued] illegally by the prisoners. Terezín was the chosen ghetto to be shown by the Nazis as a tactic to oppose the world opinion about the horrendous and dreadful conditions of the camps. And, so to a certain extent art was promoted and even a huge library of more than 50,000 books was assembled. Both adults and children were involved in survival not only trying to get enough food and warmth but also literature, visual arts, music, theater, philosophy.

  "My own personal pictures taken at the ghetto have been transformed into photo etchings. Paper rolls intend to express what we remember but sometimes tend to ignore as if meaning has been compartmentalized. Poems express part of the story in a voice that transcends my own voice. I have chosen different types of paper for that objective: Japanese, Mexican, and Nepal." — Mado Reznik

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  The Boys & Bubs: Daddy & Papa

  Benjamin D. Rinehart

  "This lift-the-flap book details the journey of two individuals who met in New York City and eventually moved to Appleton, Wisconsin to start a family. Each page has multiple tabs that reveal the narrative." - Rinehart

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  The Boys & Bubs: Seasons of Change

  Benjamin D. Rinehart

  "The USA offers a diverse range of scenery and opportunities with the change of the seasons. Swimming, climbing trees, playgrounds, gardening, riding bikes, bon fires, pumpkin and apple picking, sledding, and snow ball fights are just a few things that come to mind. My family is no different than many others when it comes to enjoying the great outdoors." - Rinehart

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  Transforming Hate: An Artist's Book

  Clarissa Sligh

  "I am a black woman. I am an artist. For many years I have been creating work to bring issues of social justice into the public discourse. This book evolved from a project for which I folded origami cranes from pages of white supremacist books for the exhibition, Speaking Volumes: Transforming Hate. It was organized by the Montana Human Rights Network and the Holter Art Museum in Helena, Montana and opened in 2008. In 'Transforming Hate: An Artist’s Book,' I was trying to look at what it was like for me to turn the hateful words of the white supremacist books into a beautiful art object. That exploration helped me understand more fully the many levels of oppression and violence at the intersections of race, gender, class and sexual orientation. Why do we keep each other from being who we really are? How can we begin to talk about what separates us? In our roles, as voyeur and as participant, we make daily decisions about who gets to have rights and who is marginalized in our society. I ask us to question our perceptions about history, reality, identity and voice. Do we have the courage to live differently?" - Clarissa Sligh

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  Dear Daughter

  Cristina Tran

  A series of letters by Christina Tran to the author’s future daughter juxtaposed against photos of their late mother. They are about our worth in the world, fighting the good fight, and always trusting in your own spirit – always.

  "The mission of 'Dear Daughter' is to put more messages of empowerment out into the world for female-identifying persons. Through storytelling and workshops, we act as a conduit for these messages. We write these messages physically 'onto the world' in order to help create the future we envision –– one letter at a time." –– Cristina Tran

  According to Tran's website, each time she tables at a zine fest or convention, she strives to create "mini experiences" that allow people walking by to interact with her and her work by writing a small "Dear Daughter" note of encouragement or empowerment and taking another one home. She posts some of these notes on her Instagram, @dear_daughter_.

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  In My Country

  Aileen Bassis

  "This book grew out of some earlier work about the immigrant experience. I asked immigrants what they missed about their lives in their native countries and used their replies in combination with prints from photos that I took in urban areas of northern New Jersey and New York City." - Aileen Bassis

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  Buddha's Tears

  Wei Jane Chir

  Buddha’s Tears exposes the hidden story of organ harvesting in China from prisoners of conscience, such as Falun Gong practitioners. Statistical information is juxtaposed with poetic rendering of a legend of a statue of Buddha, who weeps in times of crisis. Each page is filled with dates, graphs, maps, drawings and stories, concluding with a sutured image of China, a symbol of healing. The accordion pages unravel to form a long scroll, a traditional form of Chinese storytelling, to lay out the facts of China’s cruelty.